Tomorrow is the second anniversary of the
Million Man March which Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam are
celebrating with a “Day of Atonement.” On "Meet the Press" Sunday, Min.
Farrakhan noted that it was patterned after the Jewish “Day of Atonement,”
celebrated last week as Yom Kippur: “We believe the children of Israel are a
sign or a prototype of the 400-year suffering of blacks in America. Since we
are not quite slaves and not quite free, we are somewhat in the position as
the children of Israel in the wilderness.” He has called on African-Americans
to observe the day by refraining from work and devoting it to reflection and
prayer. One of the aims is to demonstrate to white Americans how important
blacks are in the work force and the life of the nation. I’m not sure how
successful it will be, nor is he, but he is determined to push ahead in the
spirit of Martin Luther King and passive resistance, which Martin Luther King
explicitly borrowed from Gandhi. Gandhi more than a half century ago, finally
got the attention of the British Raj by inviting the people of India to take
the day off in protest against imperialism.

I spent five hours with Min. Farrakhan
last Friday in his Washington, DC hotel room. (I teased him about his
political ambitions when I found he was in the presidential suite.) I’d
encouraged him to do "Meet the Press," as Tim Russert has made a genuine
effort to understand what he is all about. Russert has come to suspect, as I
concluded some time ago, that Farrakhan is really not the anti-Semitic bigot
he has been painted. He may, in fact, turn out to be a positive force for
reconciliation, here and in the Middle East -- a kind of sheep in wolf’s
clothing.

I’ve had some comments from friends that
the idea of asking blacks to take the day off is a negative request,
kind of like a general strike, while the Million Man March was a
positive event. My own assessment is that Farrakhan realizes the MMM
did not have the impact that he had hoped, in getting the white community to
fathom the depth of the despair among blacks. A whole generation of young
black men has been “warehoused” in the prison system, during the economic
breakdown of the past 30 years. The women they would have married and the
children they should be parenting are being further crippled by the welfare
system, the drug culture, and an education system that does not
educate.

I told Min. Farrakhan about all the
criticism you get from the conservatives for discussing the race problem,
bringing it up again and again in almost every speech you make. He understands
that there are also blacks who are now well-to-do who don’t think about it, or
try not to think about it, expecting it will eventually fix itself. With the
stock market up and the unemployment rate down, people are finally able to
catch their breaths and think maybe things are getting better -- and here is
Farrakhan and Kemp reminding us of those left behind.

What does Farrakhan want? Reparations? A
big bag of money? Double food stamps? None of that, which I think he made
clear at the MMM. At our conference in Florida, he stood and applauded when
Rep. John Kasich stated that “It is a sin for government to do for people what
they can do for themselves.” He simply wants the nation’s attention, and hopes
to get it in a peaceful way. Neither of the two political parties are really
interested in doing anything more than warehousing the troublemakers in
prison. Democrats throw some promises around at election time and President
Clinton appoints a race commission that doesn’t know what it is supposed to
do. Republicans promise their white constituents to be as tough on criminals
as possible, to end welfare as we know it by throwing people off the rolls, by
giving out school vouchers designed by country-club social engineers, and by
celebrating the arrival of a “color-blind society.” Here are all these
Republican “intellectuals” debating the future of conservatism and the future
of the party, and not a word about the millions of black Americans crippled by
what they have been put through these past 400 years.

It’s quite amazing to think of how
difficult the white community has made it for Farrakhan and the Nation of
Islam during the past 15 years, and how he has never wavered from his message
of non-violence and self-help -- building a separate black community that is
crime free, drug free, and devoted to keeping the statutes and commandments of
the Creator. How can a man who has produced so much good out of so much
despair be thought of as a Black Hitler, the term unjustly applied to him by
former New York City Mayor Ed Koch?

The New York Post story on
Monday may have been a turning point in Farrakhan’s relations with the Jewish
community. It was a simple account of Farrakhan’s comments on "Meet the
Press", but it is the first fair account of a Farrakhan event in the
Post since 1984 and the “Black Hitler” headline. It could be that my
exchange of letters with Ed Koch -- who has a column in the Post --
has done some good, especially when Koch acknowledged that the Anti-Defamation
League had for years been mistakenly asserting that Farrakhan called the Pope
an agent of the “anti-Christ.”`It also helped that Min. Farrakhan’s criticism
of Muslim extremism and terrorism in the Middle East finally made it into
print. Next, maybe The New York Times.

You should know that Farrakhan continues
to appreciate your boldness in coming up to shake his hand before the
Tyson/Holyfield fight began in Las Vegas. At the time, he was still considered
more socially unacceptable than a barrel of lepers. He has advanced
considerably, in part because you broke the ice. On the set of "Meet the
Press," one of the other guests went out of her way to come over to Farrakhan
to shake his hand and wish him well: Janet Reno! It meant a lot to him. He
wished her good luck in her difficult situation -- the two of them living on
thin ice.

Anyway, I think the day can be a success
in moving the country another step ahead, toward atonement and reconciliation.
To be a success, though, there has to be a breakthrough of understanding on
the part of white America and its white leaders. This is quite different than
the Promise Keepers event, which appealed to all men, as long as they are
Christian, and is solely focused on starting fresh. The Nation of Islam’s ‘Day
of Atonement’ and Million Man March is much tougher, because it is emphatic in
arguing there can be no fresh start without a recognition by the whole of the
American family -- Christians, Jews, Muslims and those with no religious
beliefs -- that there is unfinished business that has to be cleaned up before
we can pretend to be one nation, starting fresh.